Autonomic networking simulation is a big challenge. Existing network simulators are not completely suitable to test and validate current proposed autonomic architectures. It would be interesting to identify the simulator that can be extended to validate the performance of these architectures. This paper presents some of the most interesting network simulators and compares them by using some autonomic considerations. We identified a number of important characteristics that a simulator should have to enable simulating autonomic context-aware networks. Finally, an example of autonomic DiffServ architecture is simulated and validated.